javascript - What is the difference between $(this) and this

Question

I have the following code

$('a').click(function() {
var url= this.href;
alert(url);
});

This works just fine and sure enough the returned result is the url of a tag.

However if I change the above code to

$('a').click(function() {
var url= $(this).href;
alert(url);
});

The result is undefined.

Anyone please help to clear this out for me? I am banging my head for this ....

Answer 1

$(this) creates a jQuery object which wraps this. The native DOM object has an href attribute, but jQuery does not.

$(this).attr("href") would work.